Installing Node.js in the Windows Linux Subsystem (WLS) is quick and easy – accomplished by essentially running 2 commands. By reading the official Node.js docs, we can see that Ubuntu installs are provided via NodeSource. Once at NodeSource, we see the commands required for Debian based Linux systems, such as Ubuntu (as of the time of this writing, I am running the Ubuntu 18.04.01 LTS subsystem).

First, we need to pull down the installer script and execute it using a 1-liner:

curl -sL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_11.x | sudo -E bash -

A bit about the command that we just ran. As you’re likely already aware, curl is a command line utility for interfacing with various protocols – in this case, http(s). If so inclined, you can take a look at the contents of the “setup_11.x” bash script. So, as you know, we’re working with a bash script – which we’re pulling down with the assistance of curl, but rather than saving it to our local filesystem, we’re piping it’s contents to bash, which we’re elevating using sudo. As you may have noticed, we’re actually calling “sudo -E”, which instructs sudo to preserve environmental variables while executing. So we call “bash -” as administrator, that training dash instructing bash “take the input from the pipe and treat the contents of a bash script”. By inspecting the output, or better yet from reading the bash script, we can see that we’re essentially modifying our apt sources to allow us to ‘apt install’ Node.js using the NodeSource repo. Easy peasy.

sudo apt-get install -y nodejs

With our apt sources updated to include the NodeSource repo, we use “apt-get install” to install nodejs – just as we would any apt package. Just as is the case with other apt installed packages, apt will evaluate all required dependencies for Node.js and install them on your system as needed before installing the Node.js binary.

Once installation has completed, you should be able to execute “node -v” and “npm -v” to see your installed versions.

We now have a fully functional Node.js environment in our Windows Linux Subsystem!

I have recently been building an API using NestJS (Angular-like dev flow for writing Expressjs apps in TypeScript). While developing under Windows is pleasant enough, I was somewhat surprised at how painful deploying the application to IIS via IISNode can be. I quickly discovered that Nodejs applications often don’t behave identically when running under IISNode. I also quickly discovered that debugging an application running IISNode isn’t particularly straight forward in 2018. If you’ve found yourself reading this post, you’ve likely discovered as I have – that IISNode support in 2018 can be difficult to come by, despite IISNode still being a cornerstone to Nodejs support on Windows.

As I hit my first obstacles with IISNode, I of course fired up Google and started looking for guidance. While I found a number of posts and writeups detailing how to debug an IISNode hosted app, most of what I ran across was dated and seemingly no longer works. If you find yourself going down this rabbit’s hole, you will quickly find many threads on StackOverflow and github without any real resolution. I really started to sweat when I ran across the official original IISNode github repo – which has largely been abandoned for a number of years. (At least now the repo points you towards the slightly better maintained Azure fork due to a little Twitter exchange).

Since things do behave differently at times under IISNode, the ability to debug is crucial – and without it, I found myself debating rewriting my entire API to a stack more recently supported for IIS debugging. But before throwing the baby out with the bathwater, I figured I would try a couple more things to see if I could salvage my API codebase.

Since the documented debugging approach no longer seems to work, and since there are so many unanswered problems regarding this on StackOverflow and GitHub, I figured my time and energy was better served elsewhere. While perhaps a solution does exist to get the documented debugging approach working, many who have come before me have seemingly failed – and ultimately abandoned using IISNode as a result. I don’t want this to be me.

Developing a NodeJS application on Windows in VSCode is a very pleasant experience when running under NodeJS directly. Node module support in Windows by popular libraries has come a long way over the last several years – and so most things just work. Knowing that we already know and like the VSCode approach, I figured this was a good starting point – “get VSCode setup to debug an IISNode hosted application somehow”.

In reviewing the VSCode node debugging info, I ran across “Attach to Remote”. While my intent was to debug the staging environment locally in VSCode (vs remotely), I figured this was an approach that I’d not yet tried and so was at least worth a glance. I further assumed that VSCode wouldn’t particularly care if I was attaching to some remote IP or a local one, so long as I was checking off all of the required boxes.

By default, VSCode doesn’t have any launch configurations setup for our project. Since there are no default configured launch profiles, you should find a screen similar to the following when you click on the ‘debugging’ icon (4th icon on the left menu). To get started, we need to create a launch.json, which will populate the debug dropdown currently displaying ‘No Configuration’.

No Launch Configuration

We can manually create the “.vscode/launch.json” file in the root of our project if we desire, but I’m going to let VSCode do that for me. Let’s start by clicking on the the dropdown that currently reads “No Configurations” – and then selecting “Add Configuration”, before finally selecting “Node.js” as our environment.

Adding a new configuration.

You should now be staring at the generated launch.json file, which most likely looks like the following screenshot.

Generated launch file

Since we’re just here to get debugging working, we’re just going to edit this configuration rule rather than creating a new one. We can begin by changing the value for “request” to “attach”. Let’s go ahead and update our name to something more accurate too – “Debug IISNode”. We can delete the “program” setting altogether. Now we need to add a few more settings – namely “address”, “port”, “localRoot” and “remoteRoot”. Some of these values will vary based on your local environment – see the screenshot below for mine.

Debug config in launch.json

As you may have noticed when reading my “localRoot” and “remoteRoot” values, I am simply debugging against the express example that’s installed by the IISNode Full installer. You can debug any Nodejs application that you desire by updating these paths accordingly.

Since the Express example application doesn’t have a iisnode.yml, I’ve copied the one included in the ‘configuration’ example that was also installed by the IISNode Full installer. We will need to make a few modifications to the copied iisnode.yml to get things working like we want. First, we’re going to need to uncomment the “nodeProcessCommandLine” setting and ensure that the path is the correct node.exe path – we’re also going to want to add ‘–inspect’ following the closing quotation as you see in the screenshot below, as this is the glue that makes debugging possible.

Setting up nodeProcessCommandLine to inspect

Another change to the iisnode.yml setup that you will likely want to make is to make sure that ‘nodeProcessCountPerApplication’ is set to 1. By default, IISNode will spin up 1 node.exe instance per processor that you have on the machine – and so you may find some unnecessarily complications when debugging against 4 instances of your application at the same time.

While I am uncertain if this helps anything, I also like to update my iisnode.yml to disable the build in debugging which no longer seems to work in 2018. This is optional, and I have found that our VSCode debugging will work regardless – I just like to do this to eliminate any possible unwanted magic. I also, at least initially, like to enable logging in my iisnode.yml, as it can help identify startup issues happening before your logic is up and running (and hopefully logging).

With everything saved, it’s a good idea to restart out website in IIS. Truth told, this shouldn’t be required as changes to the web.config and iisnode.yml should trigger a reload, though I’ve previously ran into issues that I believe perhaps were related to not all changes being properly loaded, so I now just do this explicit restart for good measure.

Now, using a tool like Process Explorer, we can inspect the node.exe instance that IISNode is using and see that it’s been launched with the “–inspect” flag.

Inspecting node.exe to see the ‘–inspect’ flag

Now we just have to launch our new debugging config. Once it’s selected from the dropdown, we can either click the ‘Play’ button or press F5. Since we’re trying to debug, it’s probably a good idea to set a breakpoint or two.

With the debugger attached, we can now visit our running application – once we hit a route associated with our breakpoints, we will find that we now have a fully functional debugging environment in VSCode for our IISNode handled application!

Hitting a breakpoint in VSCode!

I didn’t see this documented elsewhere, and so figuring this out was a bit of a challenge – hoping that this saves a little bit of headache and heartburn!

I’ve recently continued to work with Angular 6 and have really enjoyed the updated experience! As mentioned in the last post, I’d recently been presented with the challenge of finding a way to secure the implementation details of a library in a way that continued to support JIT and AOT builds.

As previously discussed, while some success was found with Angular 4 using Rollup, I could never get a single package capable of JIT and AOT – and instead had to rely on a process of generating 2 packages (one for our builds and one for 3rd party devs). And as previously discussed, I’ve found this process to be much more streamlined in Angular 6 due to the first class library generation support that Angular 6 brought to the table via ng-packagr.

Background/Motivations

I am an an enterprise architect who currently calls the arena of Fintech home. Years ago, we set out to modernize our main client facing systems and their supporting APIs. For the front end, we set our targets and AngularJS and didn’t look back. Our challenge wasn’t a small one – coming from a .Net and Java heavy world in terms of our existing code bases, part of our systems included a 3rd party ecosystem which allowed partner developers to extend our base functionality. Not only could partner developers extend the system’s core functionality, but they could also package up their extensions in a manner compatible with our systems so that they could be resold to other organizations who also benefited from this new functionality.

The initial release of our revamped, albiet feature-limited system, was very well recieved – and almost immediately the ecosystem began to grown around it at a pace nearly exceeding our ability to continue to build out our initial system… A good problem to have – and so we continued to iterate and release.

As anyone who works in “Enterprise Development” knows, IP is an important point of focus – companies often require first and foremost that trade industries be protected, and that key implementation details be locked away under lock and key. Of course due to the core realities of JavaScript, this posed us an interesting challenege – in that you’re highly limited in the ways that you can protect your propritary logic without breaking things. But ultimately we persisted and prevailed – obfuscation and minification got us past our requirements so that we could forge ahead with our new stack based on ‘web technologies’.

For our system, which was based on AngularJS 1.5, we found the decorator pattern to suit us quite nicely when faced with the requirements of ‘code protection’. Using the decorator pattern, we were able to provide developer guidance documents which served to expose extenibility points via documentation. While less than perfect, it worked pretty well for us and our clients – particularly when you consider the reality of JavaScript development, where API documentation was king, vs TypeScript development, where Typings are king (and more or less a requirement).

Fast foward a year+ and several iterations later, we found ourselves with a functional codebase now ported to Angular 4. Angular 4 provided us some new and interesting challenges – namely that the ballgame, and its associated rules which we had build our system around had changed. While we had completely redesigned our extensibility approach, which is outside of the scope of this document, we were faced with the very real problem of the 3rd party developer flow, which had seemingly degraded from Angular 1.x to 4.x under our design.. While I can’t go too far into the details, a lot of the 3rd party work had to be done out of band – integration testing with the core platform required round trips to the build server under our design just to get a working environment to test your enhancements (which may have been broken due to an errant keystroke that had gone unnoticed before pushing for the build – so you had to do it all over again).

As a stop-gap, we devised a new approach; though also far from optimal. As we should have, we shifted the burden from the 3rd party developers back to ourselves. How we accomplished this initially was via 2 different Angular npm packages of our core functionality. While we tried time and time again, we could never get “one library to rule them all”. What we could come up with was a system backed by 2 different builds of our core library. 1) The developer pacakge, which was capable of JIT with typing support, but only contained minified/obfuscated transpiled JavaScript housing the implementation details. 2) The build package, which supported AOT production builds, but contained unobfuscated logic and so could only be distributed to partnered builders with whom we had a legal agreement with concerning our IP.

This approach ‘worked’, but was never quite favored – it felt hacky and was difficult to maintain multiple builds…

Needless to say, we had to find a better way.

A Better Way

Enter Angular 6 – with it’s fancy first class support of library generation. Not quite knowing what we were getting into, a port of our 4.x to 6.x was undertaken – and went surprisingly well. From here we worked to break out all of our implementation which was intended to be ‘protected’ in to Angular Libraries (with the help of the Angular CLI and ng-packagr). Once our cleanup efforts were complete, we had a handful of Angular 6 feature libraries and what is essentially a shell application to tie them together.

While I am still struggling to grok the hows and whys that this works, it seemingly just does for now. In Angular 4 Land, we could never quite get our obfuscated/minified package to work for AOT Prod builds, though it worked perfectly fine for JIT builds; hence our need for 2 pacakges. But I am happy to report that the rules are apparently different in Angular 6 Land – as we are now able to create this ‘one package to rule them all’ in a relatively straight forward manner.

During some of the exploratory phase, I’d spoken on gitter with Alex Rickabaugh (@alxhub) about what we were trying to accomplish. While our interactions were small in regards to our Angular 4 efforts, I popped back in to update Alex on the success we’d found with Angular 6 – at which time he requested that I do a quick writeup in the case that it might assist others….

…so here we are…

Here be dragons…

As previously mentioned, the steps are currently pretty straight forward. For the following overview, let’s assume we arrived here from “ng g library awesomesauce”.
– “ng build awesomesauce –prod”
– Navigate to /dist/awesomesauce/
– Delete the esm5, esm2015, esm5, and fesm2015 folders.
– Navigate to /dist/bundles/ and delete the non *.min.* resources and the map associated with your minified bundle.
– Back in /dist/awesomesauce/, open up package.json and make the following edits:
– update ‘main’ to reference the *.min.js bundle in /bundles/
– Delete ‘module’, ‘es2015’, ‘esm5’, ‘esm2015’, ‘fesm5’ and ‘fesm2015’ key/value pairs
– “ng pack”

You are now the proud parent of a ‘secured’ Angular 6 library packaged for installation via NPM into an Angular 6 application – your bouncing new Angular library provides developer typing support for your public APIs, and which more importantly only contains minified/obfuscated implementation logic. Of course this isn’t 100% secure – you still have a considerable amount of information which is exposed in your *.d.ts typing files, and there’s still quite a bit that can be inferred in combination with your included metadata file (which is required for this all to work as described)… This said, I do believe that there’s little/nothing more exposed by this package than has always been the case with JavaScript libraries that provide typing support.

Note: Again, here be dragons. I am not a web security expert. The process described here may or may not stand up to rigorous scrutiny. We’re in the process of vetting this and working to clear the security requirements imposed upon us – but so far this appears to be fitting the bill for us, so perhaps it will for you too.

So I decided to make things permanent! immatt.com is now the official home of Matt Ezell! After years of living at mattezell.info, I’ve decided to make the plunge and go TOP LEVEL! WHAAAA?!?!

While I still hold mattezell.info, I will be redirecting its properties to immatt.com going forward. All new projects coming out of the Matt Brand™ will likely now live somewhere in the vicinity of immatt.com unless otherwise branded.

For those wishing to trip down memory lane, mattezell.info’s original content now lives at archive.immatt.com – I just couldn’t bear to part with it, so there it is… The new blog of course lives here, at blog.immatt.com. I’m still up in the air as to what I am going to put at the root immatt.com, so for now it’s 302 forwarding to here (blog.immatt.com).